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In a nutshell, NN is the idea that the Internet is a shared, global network that should not be tampered with at its base level. If you want to be part of the network, you have to respect the network. This means, if you want your sites to be accessible to everybody else, then you have to make sure your customers have access to the entirety of the Internet. You can't break it into pieces and show either prejudice or favoritism in determining which content can be accessed over your system.

Simple as that. You want in? All or nothing. Play FAIR. Treat others the way you like to be treated.

Beyond this, it's important to note that before the Internet came around, there were plenty of private networks created and run by private companies. They could do what they wanted. But the Internet was created by taxpayer money and made wide open to anybody because it was a public resource. Because nobody "owned" the Internet, it prospered and eventually became the default network.

Now private companies want to take control of it and slice it into pieces and charge extra for parts, or deny you access to parts of it if the content isn't something they agree with. That's really bad.

Net Neutrality opponents argue that Net Neutrality is anti-freedom-of-speech, but they are lying. What they really mean, is that they believe they should have the freedom to deny you access to content over their network, and if you don't allow it, you're denying them their rights. It's a bizarro, irrational argument.

Why do some companies want Net Neutrality abolished?

Simple. They can make more money charging their customers for access. They can shut down competitive Internet services so they're the only game in town. The abolishment of Net Neutrality will cost consumers more and offer them less choices.

The Net Neutrality fight is split clearly along party lines.

The Republicans and the Libertarian parties are in favor of abolishing Net Neutrality. Their corporate benefactors have paid them well to push a variety of narratives convincing people it's a good thing to get rid of. To them, it's about money and control. Their idea of "freedom of speech" is refusing to carry anyone else's traffic on their network if they can't monetize it the way they want.

The Democrats have been the only party to consistently fight to protect the neutrality of the Internet. If you care about this issue, there is a party you can vote for that will protect it. Remember this in 2018. It's really important if you want full access to information, news and everything else.

It's quite popular to say, "both parties are the same" and they both are pawns to special interests, but not all parties are equally beholden to special interests, and the Net Neutrality issue is another clear example of this. If you care about the Internet, protest, contact your representatives. If you don't want to have to keep doing this over and over, vote for people who have a clear respect for the Internet. Pay attention to which parties are easier to reach and more attentive to your needs.

Some corporations are being deceitful.

You may on occasion hear that AT&T or Verizon is in favor of Net Neutrality. In reality, they and other large providers have spent millions to shut it down. Now they're muddying the waters trying to re-define what Net Neutrality means. If they can't get it abolished, then they'll write their own series of bills that re-defines what NN is, and includes the loopholes they want to filter and control traffic on their network. No matter what they say, the large providers are not friends of Net Neutrality. Beware of ANY legislation they propose which supposedly "protects" the sanctity of the Internet.

There's a huge mutiny in progress over at Reddit.com. This is an Internet-first as far as I know and it'll probably be big news soon. The company fired an employee that was responsible for helping a bunch of moderators of different subs, and left them in chaos. They decided to make their part of Reddit private, and then in solidarity hundreds of other moderators joined and have been turning off parts of Reddit one-by-one since yesterday.

This is going to be very interesting... Imagine if everybody on YouTube or Facebook suddenly made all their content private? That's what's in the early stages of happening on Reddit. It will be very interesting to see how the company reacts. On one of my subs,we're having a discussion as to whether or not we'll join what they're calling the "Great Blackout of 2015"

These days everybody is using Facebook. But did you know if you pay to promote something, you might actually hurt your business and waste your money? A diligent Internet truth-seeker shows you in this video that all is not what it seems when it comes to advertising on Facebook, and even Facebook itself is at least indirectly involved in phony and fraudulent activity.

It's no secret I like Reddit. I myself run a few popular subreddits. But like many, it's impossible to have a love-love relationship with this site. For every cool section, there's another one that makes your skin crawl. For every person you can relate to, there's eighteen dozen who appear to be Tourettes-infected-6-year-olds.

We could talk for days about the pros/cons of their shallow and binary up/down-vote system, and how it seems to ultimately pander to a mean demographic that nobody wants to own, but at the same time, the largely "hands off"-style of allowing anyone with the slightest inclination to create their own sub-community, has allows the place to prosper wildly.

And every time I come across something odd, I think it can't be topped. I continue to prove myself wrong. Here is a list of some of my "most bizarre" subreddits recently discovered...

If you've been wondering where we've been to these last few months, not cranking out as many stories as we usually do, it's because we've been working on a super secret project that is now time to be revealed.

Deep in the recesses of the BSA Secret Fortress(tm), we have been building a "super" computer, a hybrid Compaq 386 with 256k of RAM and some super good programming to create the ultimate Internet language translator. With this, we've managed to provide the computer with certain input text and have it translate the result into a universal language of truth. We're just getting the machine going - see what we've discovered and make your own requests for translation!

A huge Internet outrage has erupted in the wake of GoDaddy's latest commercial leak online of what was apparently going to be their Superbowl commercial. Which has now been pulled.

In what appears to be a clear attempt to court sadist and sociopathic customers, they tell the tale of the abandoned puppy that desperately tries to find its way back to its owner (a GoDaddy customer) who expresses excitement at the puppy returning home after its arduous journey so she can ship it off to someone who bought it off her GoDaddy web site... yes... WHAT?

Watch the video - we have it here. GoDaddy has pulled it from the Internet.

Facebook Inc must face a class action lawsuit accusing it of violating its users' privacy by scanning the content of messages they send to other users for advertising purposes, a U.S. judge has ruled.

U.S. District Judge Phyllis Hamilton in Oakland, California, on Tuesday dismissed some state-law claims against the social media company but largely denied Facebook's bid to dismiss the lawsuit.

Facebook had argued that the alleged scanning of its users' messages was covered by an exception under the federal Electronic Communications Privacy Act for interceptions by service providers occurring in the ordinary course of business.

But Hamilton said Facebook had "not offered a sufficient explanation of how the challenged practice falls within the ordinary course of its business."

For every person who had to wait forever for Time Warner Cable, Inc. to pick up the phone, for every customer who had to slog through an automated voice menu, then stew waiting to talk to a person, for every family that went days without TV or internet, Los Angeles City Attorney Rocky Delgadillo struck a blow Friday. On behalf of the city of Los Angeles, Delgadillo sued the top cable provider for southern California, saying its service was so bad it constituted fraud and deceptive advertising.

Charter Communications, the fourth-largest cable system in the United States, has started telling its high-speed Internet customers that it is going to keep track of every site they visit on the Web.

The cable company will sell the data to a firm called NebuAd, which in turn will use it to show ads to Web-surfing Charter customers that are meant to be related to their interests. (Visit a knitting site yesterday and see yarn ads today.)

About one percent of the Web pages being delivered on the Internet are being changed in transit, sometimes in a harmful way, according to researchers at the University of Washington.

In a paper, the researchers document some troubling practices. In July and August they tested data sent to about 50,000 computers and discovered that a small number of ISPs were injecting ads into Web pages on their networks. They also found that some Web browsing and ad-blocking software was actually making Web surfing more dangerous by introducing security vulnerabilities into pages.

Virginia's Supreme Court on Friday upheld the first US felony conviction for spamming. The spammer will serve nine years in prison for sending what authorities believe to be millions of messages over a two-month period in 2003.

Jeremy Jaynes is the man who will make history. A Raleigh, North Carolina, resident who made Spamhaus' top 10 list of spammers, Jaynes was arrested in 2003 even before the CAN SPAM act was passed by Congress. Jaynes was convicted in 2005, but his lawyers appealed the conviction. This past Friday, the Virginia Supreme Court upheld that conviction, but the vote was a narrow 4-3.

The Army has shut down public access to the largest online collection of its doctrinal publications, a move criticized by open-government advocates as unnecessary secrecy by a runaway bureaucracy.

Army officials moved the Reimer Digital Library ( http://atiam.train.army.mil) behind a password-protected firewall on Feb. 6, restricting access to an electronic trove that is popular with researchers for its wealth of field and technical manuals and documents on military operations, education, training and technology. All are unclassified, and most already are approved for public release.

eBay has announced new changes to their feedback system. Sellers aren't too happy, but buyers may be thrilled. Among the new changes, sellers will no longer be able to leave negative/neutral feedback for buyers.

A couple of geniuses from Kansas City decided to combine two things that nobody else would've ever thought to combine-- cabs and karaoke. Unlike my unsuccessful startup in the 90's featuring golf and violent thunderstorms, I think this brain trust is really on to something!

At first I thought this was an anomaly, but after weeks of this activity happening over and over, it cannot be ignored: Microsoft's Hotmail servers seem to have been taken over by spammers and are now pumping out large quantities of spam.

The authors behind a specific strain of malware are trying every trick in the book to get users to succumb to their ill-meaning plans. You name it, they've used it: weather news, personal greetings, reports that Saddam Hussein is still alive, reports that Fidel Castro is dead, sexy women, YouTube, and even blogs. The group seems hellbent on creating the largest botnet to date, and as long as users are stupid enough to click on things without thinking, they just might do it.

AT&T chief Ed Whitacre handed the keys over to his replacement Randall Stephenson yesterday, but not before giving a rousing pep talk to fellow executives in the company’s San Antonio board room. We just received exclusive video of the AT&T chairman’s parting speech.

A 27-year-old man described as one of the world's most prolific spammers was arrested Wednesday, and federal authorities said computer users across the Web could notice a decrease in the amount of junk e-mail.

Robert Alan Soloway is accused of using networks of compromised "zombie" computers to send out millions upon millions of spam e-mails.

"He's one of the top 10 spammers in the world," said Tim Cranton, a Microsoft Corp. lawyer who is senior director of the company's Worldwide Internet Safety Programs. "He's a huge problem for our customers. This is a very good day."

Despite the claim that this "top spammer" has been captured, we see no indication whatsoever that spam volume has been reduced. But it's still a good sign that the government is finally pulling their heads out of the sand and dealing with these criminals.

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